Breastfeeding and Postpartum

BrittanyElderkin

Trying to find a way to add breastfeeding as it burns a lot of calories. Just not sure how to include it on the app. Would be cool to hear from other Mama's and their experience using this app.

AnnPT77

I'm not a mama, but I've seen others here recommend setting calories at maintenance, and letting the breast feeding itself create a moderate calorie deficit for weight loss, rather than logging it explicitly.

mmocarr

If you have a realistic sense of how much your producing you can multiply each ounce by 20 calories to get the approximate additional calorie burn. I personally underestimate a bit because this is inexact. I pump 12 ounces and feed one other time, so I assume about 16 ounces daily.

If you have no sense of how much you’re producing because you don’t pump or do weighed feedings, I’d set to maintenance and have my deficit come from breastfeeding as the above post commented.

hybridangel

If you go into your diary andbyou add it as a food So type in breastfeeding and I believe it works it out for you. This is what I used my children are now 9 and 6. I am not still breast feeding them. Just. Type it in. I think there is an option for excusive or partial breastfeeding.

andreajlnhe

MFP used to have an option for breastfeeding under exercise. I'm pretty sure there were several options, including an option for nursing a toddler, because I used to enter that in at 200 calories per day. However it seems to no longer exist, sadly. So I would just do some research and make an educated guess on how many calories you think you might be burning. Nursing a newborn should be around 450-500 calories. You could find an exercise on the app that matches your estimate and enter it in every day; or, you could change your settings to add that number of calories to your daily calorie goal.

Simply setting calories to maintenance is also a great option, especially if Baby is exclusively breastfed.

cwolfman13

You can add your own custom "exercise" and the estimated calories burned. It doesn't have to be something selected from the database. I have a ton of my own custom exercises because they weren't in the database. For example when I was doing Wendler's 5/3/1 I had a custom exercise I named "being Jim Wendler's *kitten*"